Textual Analysis: Document Terms
To further examine “The Call of Cthulhu’s” prominence, I examined it with the Document Terms tool which creates a list of the most frequently used terms with an eye towards finding which words it had in common with his larger body of work.
Document Terms: "The Call of Cthulhu"
Surprisingly, the most frequently occurring word for “Call of Cthulhu” was “cult”, which appeared 36 times throughout the text. As a general term, it’s a bit difficult to pin down anything specific about it within Lovecraft’s larger corpus and, unsurprisingly, it appears nearly 164 more times through his body of work, though most of those occur within “Call of Cthulhu” itself. In an attempt to confirm this via AntConc’s concordance tool, I discovered Voyant’s word tally was for “cult*” rather than “cult,” and therefore it ended up including words such as “cultivated,” “cultures” and similar occurrences of the four letters. The actual word count of “cult” was 88 instance across 17 texts (Figure 1). Following the autocomplete prompt that Voyant offered led me to false positives, something I may have missed if I had not double checked the results against AntConc. What is perhaps most interesting, however, is the fact the title word, “Cthulhu”—arguably one of Lovecraft’s most famous creations—occurs 23 times throughout the short story, and only 27 times in 11 texts throughout Lovecraft’s body of work, with 5 of these being stories he co-authored (Figures 2-3). Broken down, the data surrounding the presence of Cthulhu in Lovecraft’s text is as follows:
He first appears in 1928’s “The Call of Cthulhu,” with his final appearance in the corpus being 1940s “The Mound,” co-written by Zealia Bishop. The other prose texts he appears in are: “Medusa’s Coil” (1938) – 1, “History of the Necronomicon” (1937) – 1, “At the Mountains of Madness” (1936) – 6, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1936) – 4, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (1934) – 3, “The Whisperer of Darkness” (1931) – 5, “Dunwich Horror” (1929) – 1.
Document Terms: "The Temple"
For “The Temple,” the most common term was a character’s name, “Klenze,” which appears 19 times throughout the story. When turning to AntConc to discover whether it was limited to a single text or appeared elsewhere (such as Cthulhu or the recurring character, Randolph Carter), I discovered it was exclusive to “The Temple” (Figured 4). Furthermore, a discrepancy appeared between AntConc and Voyant’s results regarding the word’s frequency. While Voyant listed it as occurring 19 times, AntConc claimed 22 examples of it via their Concordance tool (Figure 5). This appears to be due to the ways in which each tool filter’s out apostrophes, as AntConc included several instances where the name appears in the possessive form. Interestingly, the title word, “temple”, appears only 16 times in the selected text. On the other hand, it appears throughout the corpus a total of 120 times across 26 texts (Figure 6). While most instances occur in isolated or small clusters, ranging from 1-7 instances throughout his career, there are three examples of “temple” appearing far more often, “Under the Pyramids” (1924)-21, “The Temple” (1925)-16, and “Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath” (1943)-29. Notably, “Under the Pyramids” was a collaboration with Harry Houdini, while “Dreamquest of Uknown Kadath” was published posthumously six years after his death in 1937. Despite these anomalies, the presence and usage of “temple”—much like “cult”—is too general to make any specific links between its presence in a text and this short story.